Renee Zellweger speaks onstage at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Grants Banquet at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on August 4, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.
Renee Zellweger wants the media to focus on more important things than her physical appearance and rumors about plastic surgery.
“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” the actress wrote a blog for The Huffington Post published Friday. “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.”
Zellweger’s piece includes some of the same concerns about media coverage that actress Jennifer Aniston expressed in her own essay for The Huffington Post last month.
Zellweger did not call out any specific news organizations, but she did nod at a highly criticized Variety column that took aim at her appearance in June, without using the publication’s name.
“What if immaterial tabloid stories, judgments and misconceptions remained confined to the candy jar of low-brow entertainment and were replaced in mainstream media by far more important, necessary conversations?” she wrote.
Zellweger added that “choosing the dignity of silence rather than engaging with the commerce of cruel fiction” often “leaves one vulnerable not only to the usual ridicule, but to having the narrative of one’s life hijacked by those who profiteer from invented scandal.” Thus, she decided to open up about the issue.
“I’m writing because to be fair to myself, I must make some claim on the truths of my life, and because witnessing the transmutation of tabloid fodder from speculation to truth is deeply troubling,” she wrote. “The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way.”
Zellweger’s next film, “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” premieres September 16.
